Milestone #1: The First Mold

Since last week, we finalized the design of our inner casing's core and cavity molds. We proceeded to make slight alterations to make machining easier and then CAM'd the different machining processes.

The core was estimated to take approximately 4 and a half hours to machine (without the HAAS machine). We decided to work with the instructors to use the HAAS machine in order to speed up manufacturing time and do automatic tool changes.

During manufacturing, one endmill broke off resulting in an end in the block. However, it wasn't a big problem - we removed it, edited the CAM to be a bit more careful, and continued using the machine. The mold itself wasn't damaged.

After a few days, we finally created our final core mold, machined to perfection!

The cavity was a lot simpler to make. Only taking approximately an hour and a half, the cavity didn't pose many issues although there were points where we were afraid the tool would collide with the stock. Luckily, that did not happen.

Our final cavity did have a mistake. Due to a mistake in setting the zero and orientation in our CAM, the runner was inserted away from the sprue. After resetting the CAM, we corrected this. However, when we actually injection mold the inner casing we will have to cut off the extra material formed from the "fake" runner.

In addition to the inner casing molds the following progress was made on other parts of the project:

The outer casing mold was finished.

The wind turbine mold was finished.

The water plate laser cut piece and corresponding earth thermoforming die were completed as well.

Overall, great progress was done over the last two weeks! We hope to continue to manufacture the molds and test our injection molded pieces.